Bliss Dance

You may have heard me grumble about my Drafts folder before here. Truth be told, a lot of these drafts are just a photoset and maybe a link or two, serving as more of a todo list reminder than an actual draft. Which is fine in theory, but the drafts I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about are the ones I tend to forget all about.

A weird side effect of this situation is that untouched drafts from a few years ago start to feel like they're from a different lifetime, or another parallel timeline, like the one here. We used to go to Las Vegas every now and then as a quick break from Portland: Stay in a swanky hotel for a few nights, see a show or two, maybe order room service, maybe feed a few dollars into a slot machine, and generally wander around staring at the sheer weirdness of the place, which was usually good for a fresh post or two here. Haven't been there since September 2016, though, which is when these photos were taken. Mostly the place just wasn't as interesting anymore, and it kind of felt like the point of diminishing returns had been reached for a while. It also didn't help that there'd been a spate of high-profile random shootings along the Strip -- this was before the big Mandalay Bay mass shooting in October 2017 -- plus it was becoming clear that roughly 100% of the local casino owners (i.e. the ones that weren't vast Wall Street conglomerates) were longtime Trump cronies and generous supporters of his campaign. If they were just mobsters it would be fine; bit of local color and all that. But if someone like Trump isn't an instant pariah in your industry, it makes me not want to give you another penny, at least not while he's anywhere near the levers of power.

So anyway, pivoting awkwardly from that to the actual subject of the post, here are a few photos of Bliss Dance, a ginormous sculpture by artist Marco Cochrane, which has a cool light show at night that I unfortunately have no photos of. It's currently located at the new-as-of-2016 "The Park" entertainment district, between the Park MGM (the former Monte Carlo) and the New York New York casinos. Before it was here, it spent a few years at Treasure Island -- not the casino, but the island in San Francisco Bay -- but it started to rust in the sea air and was removed in 2015. And prior to that it appeared at Burning Man 2010. Burning Man to Vegas is an unusual journey, but there are only so many places you can put a 40' statue that comes with a lightshow. New York or Miami might work, except for the sea air problem. Too big and flashy for the Northwest, too risqué for Texas, too everything for the Midwest, but it seems right at home in Vegas. For now, at least; at some point in the future the vast megacorp that owns the whole area is bound to want to "reimagine the space" based on whatever current trends happen to be, and I suppose the statue will need another new home at that point. Maybe by then the Smithsonian will be interested -- maybe they'll be tasked with adding a "What The Early 21st Century Was Really Like" wing to the American History Museum, and they realize Bliss Dance would be a perfect centerpiece for the new grand rotunda, similar to the taxidermied elephant in the Natural History Museum next door, or the battling dinosaur skeletons at the AMNH in New York. Who knows.